Nothing gets my blood boiling like seeing a worker cross another worker’s picket line to steal their job – and I’ve seen it way too often.

Across most of this country and in every single federally regulated sector, there is virtually nothing to stop it happening – and that needs to change.

Two years ago, our family concluded that our grandmother needed care in a long-term care facility, given her deteriorating health. She ended up being placed in a retirement home, where there is less hands-on care available because there were no available long-term care spaces. At the time, the wait list for a long-term care bed in Ontario was around 35,000 and the average wait time was between 5-6 months.

The debate over regulating Google and Facebook took an interesting turn recently, when prominent Canadian nationalist Richard Stursberg teamed up with Kevin Chan, Facebook’s lobbyist in Ottawa, to publish an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail that maps out a regulatory path for our federal government.

The fact that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been doing everything he can to resist regulation in Australia, is sending out his lackeys to push for regulation in Canada means he’s worried about what our government might do.

On October 26, 2020, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development began an in-depth study on zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs) in Canada. Initiated through a Bloc Quebecois motion, the Committee seeks to “examine additional measures that could be taken to encourage the production and purchase of zero-emission vehicles including a Zero-Emission Vehicle Act.”

We’ve all been hearing a lot about the size of Canada’s federal deficit lately.

Last month National Bank reported that Canada’s deficit has grown larger than any other country in the G-20.

In September, the federal government and the Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation launched the Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI), a $1 billion housing program meant to support the creation of up to 3,000 new affordable housing units, the acquisition of land, and the conversion and rehabilitation of existing buildings to affordable housing. The RHI is part of the federal government’s National Housing Strategy, an ambitious 10-year, $55 billion-plus plan launched in November 2017 that will create 100,000 new housing units and repair or renew thousands more.

Jerry Dias, Unifor National President

The 1400-worker strike in Newfoundland at Dominion grocery stores owned by Loblaw Companies Limited, now in its eleventh week, will go down in history as the first major Canadian labour dispute of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On one level, it is a dispute about fundamental workplace standards, wages and job security. Dig deeper and you quickly realize this dispute is about fairness, decency and respect in Canada’s low-wage retail sector.

As the dust settles from the 2020 B.C. election, parties on both sides of the aisle are reflecting on lessons learned and what comes next.

For the B.C. Liberals, they can hang a significant degree of blame on leadership that is increasingly out of touch with the day-to-day concerns of British Columbians. Leader Andrew Wilkinson is only a symptom of a wider rot in a caucus indifferent to the skyrocketing costs of housing and hostile to reducing income inequality.

The aviation industry will come back. 

People will travel again, for business, for pleasure, to see family or to new job opportunities in another city or even another country. This is well understood by all levels of government.

It won’t happen tomorrow, of course, but it will happen, and we need to be ready.

The first thing, of course, is to make sure that the industry has what it needs to reopen. There is a growing consensus that ensuring Canada has an aviation industry in the future will require the federal government playing a greater role.

Just when Canadians need strong news outlets to guide them through the pandemic’s second wave, those same outlets are facing extinction. 

The sharp revenue drop resulting from COVID-19 comes after years of Google and Facebook, cornering the market on consumer data and digital advertising, bleeding much-needed revenue away from newspapers, magazines and TV and radio.